Anniversary

Not anger,
that was for the soldiers
when they first saw the camps,
the chord-wood stacks of dead
the mountain of human ashes
the lime pits with their moving dead
whole bodies, a hand or head
rising on the stench of gas.

Not anger. Sorrow, yes sorrow for five million Jews ostracised by their friends stolen away from their homes in the jack-boot night after years of hate and terror to come to this, these barrack sheds all dignity starved away.

Yes sorrow, sorrow for six million other’s who saw the flames of humanity rise from the chimneys, smelled burning flesh, saw the truth in dead black smoke; smelled the sick-sweet stench of death on the filthy wooden bunks, starvation in already lifeless eyes.

Yes sorrow for the millions of years of life surrendered in so short a time; for those few that survived seeing forever the shuffling column, their parents, brothers, sisters stripped out of their lives forever at the whim of a Nazi baton.

Despair. Oh yes despair, for mankind, for civilisation, the present and the future; the dreadful legacy we bear seeing how hate poisons the mind. Only the scale was greater than before, and we must count the numbers in our dreams knowing that we – mankind – were there.